Under the Knife(68)

No.

They twitched again.

No!

Her hands relaxed.

She imagined what would happen if she were to follow through on Finney’s command.

Fun fact, she thought, with sudden, inexplicable giddiness. The liver is filled with blood. Up to fifteen percent of all the blood in your entire body, at any one time, is in the liver. A three-pound, blood-soaked sponge. Every second, of every day, blood constantly streaming in and out.

“Do it,” Finney urged. Into her ear. Into her mind. “Push the scalpel into her liver.”

On the gigantic screen, the liver appeared as big as a queen-size bed, and throbbed with every beep of the cardiac monitor.

Throbbed with blood.

With life.

If she punctured her liver with the scalpel, Rita knew, Mrs. Sanchez would bleed.

She would bleed, and almost certainly would die.

“No,” Rita murmured.

“Do it!”

She felt a hand on her arm. “Dr. Wu?”

Rita flinched and pulled her eyes away from the screen. It was Lisa. “Dr. Wu? What’s wrong? What are you doing?”

Before Rita could answer, the bored-sounding black woman standing in the front row—

(Grant, Chase had called her Grant)

—asked, “Dr. Montgomery? Why is the scalpel sticking out? From the instrument? Is Delores about to use it?”

Upon hearing the word scalpel, Chase’s head snapped around. He squinted at the screen.

“Dr. Wu? What are you doing?” he said sharply.

“Do it,” Finney repeated. “Push the scalpel into her liver.”

“No!” Rita whispered fiercely.

“Rita!” Montgomery was practically shouting. All pretense of formality for the benefit of the visitors was gone.

He moved toward her.





SEBASTIAN


Damn.

Goddamn if Wu still was fighting it!

Practically goddamn inhuman, how she was resisting. None of the experimental subjects, all men, had ever fought back with such tenacity.

“Do it,” he heard Finney whisper to her. “Push the instrument into her liver.”

“No,” she said.

And still she fought it.

Incredible!

With the signal strengths Finney had been using all morning, all that juice he’d pumped into her brain, she should be Finney’s goddamn zombie mind slave by now. Or lying facedown on the floor in a puddle of her own drool.

Goddamn but she was tough.

If Finney wasn’t careful, Sebastian worried Wu would soon be screaming like some nut job: like the ones in the videos, whose brains had been carpet-bombed with commands, and who’d then developed the thousand-mile stares.

The ones who’d died.

He sucked on his teeth.

Maybe that’s what Finney had intended for Wu all along.

Insanity.

And death.





FINNEY


Finney’s eyes narrowed to slits.

She was resisting him.

She was resisting him, and he would not have it.

He was in charge. Not her. She would not deny him the fruit of his labor, or frustrate his plan to set right the order of things. The order she’d ripped apart when she’d murdered Jenny.

No.

She would not.

He swept an index finger from one end of the tablet to the other.





RITA


The buzzing she’d experienced earlier, in the locker room, then later in the alcove with Chase, slammed its way back into her head.

But this time it was different.

It was worse.

Much worse.

This time, it hurt.

God, how it HURT!

Agony. A thousand barbed needles lancing the inside of her skull: digging, burning, ripping into her head. She’d never experienced anything like it.

She gasped and staggered.

She reached out to the OR table with one hand to steady herself, and …





SEBASTIAN


Holy shit.

Finney had turned up the signal strength again, to the highest levels so far—the highest Sebastian had ever seen—way beyond the safety parameters the designers had established in the test subjects; and he’d fired a huge pulse of energy into her brain.

“Jesus, boss. Careful,” Sebastian whispered into his link.

Finney ignored him.

“Do it,” Finney said to Wu. “Do it now. Push it into her liver.”

She would do it, Sebastian thought. Or it would rip her fucking brain apart.

Or maybe it already had.





RITA


… in that moment, that moment of grabbing the side of the OR table with one hand, Rita felt as if she were being split in two, like a coconut sliced in half by a machete.

Suddenly, the pain, the thousand sharp objects piercing her brain, were gone.

Thank God.

The pain had been excruciating. She doubted she’d be able to hold herself together if it came back.

With one hand on the edge of the operating table, and the other still on the Swiss Army, she looked around. Another Rita, an exact twin of herself—complete with sterile gown, gloves, cap, and mask—was standing next to her, looking at her; and she experienced a strong sense of déjà vu.